Continuous glucose sensors offer the potential to markedly change our understanding of glucose homeostasis in health and disease, and to provide the missing information required to achieve near-normoglycemia among persons with both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Despite their having appeared on the scene less than five years ago, continuous glucose sensors (CGS) already have been shown to be associated with short term reductions in glucose variability, time spent in nocturnal hypoglycemia, time spent in hyperglycemia, and lower glycosylated hemoglobin values. Their potential to assist patients and their families in day-to-day decision-making, to warn of impending hypoglycemia and to reduce the fear of its occurrence has yet to be fully appreciated. Indeed, the advent of CGS has stimulated the diabetes research community to re-examine the feasibility of developing a closed loop “artificial pancreas” and preliminary clinical studies of prototype closed loop systems are currently being initiated. Given the enormous therapeutic and safety potential of these systems, it seems reasonable to assume that to some extent they have been proven to be numerically and clinically accurate in both the display of glucose values and the tracking of glucose trends and rate of change.
However, unfortunately, the data regarding the accuracy of different CGS systems is presented according to criteria identical to those developed decades ago for assessing the accuracy of home blood glucose (BG) monitors providing episodic self-monitoring (SBGM) readings, and thus do not include assessments designed to evaluate the “continuous” time-dependent information (in particular rate and direction of glucose change), which is unique to CGS. Regardless of the criteria used, sensor accuracy is still substantially inferior to the accuracy of self-monitoring devices that use capillary blood (finger sticks) for glucose determination. This inaccuracy is primarily evident during hypoglycemia and is due to delays observed during blood-to-interstitial glucose transport and other factors.